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Now, he thought. Sharpe would never have understood this approach. With Sharpe you had two solutions: money or the gun. If it was too expensive to buy somebody off, you had to resort to the pistol. Well, it worked for some. Dilbeck preferred other avenues. It was a difference in philosophies. He opened the file.

She was a pretty girl. A very pretty girl. A long time ago you might have waved a bottle of acid under her face. She had long dark hair, expressive eyes,
intelligent
eyes, a soft mouth.

He looked at the photograph for some minutes. Then he closed the folder and laid it on his desk.

2

Mrs. Rowley Salladin hated marketing. Of all the chores that were involved in the smooth running of a five-bedroom house in Arlington, marketing was the worst. It was not so much the actual
visit
to the supermarket, no, it was the unpacking of brown bags when you finally got home. She stashed the new spices on the rack, the paprika, the cracked black pepper, the bay leaves. Into the freezer she put the cans of orange juice, the waffles, the lamb cutlets, the bag of ice cubes. She emptied carrots, lettuce, a bag of tomatoes, a bunch of celery, into the vegetable tray. When she was finished she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table and looked around the glossy waxed kitchen, as if she were suspicious of the existence of some dirt speck in a place she could not see. Only the other day she had found a cobweb in a high corner of the upstairs bathroom and, at its center, a large spider. She had gone for the Raid, sprayed the spider—horrified by the way it twisted, curled, dropped out of its lair—then knocked the web out with the end of a straw broom. She tapped her fingers on the table. The house was silent. Now, she thought, what was her project for the day?

The yard. She wanted to plant corn for this year. Yes, she would do something with the yard. She already had the seeds.

She finished her coffee, rinsed the empty cup, set it to dry on the yellow plastic rack.

The telephone was ringing.

The sound quite startled her, breaking as it did into the silence of the large house.

She picked up the receiver.

After all these years his voice was a shock to her
.

“You shouldn't have called,” she said. “You shouldn't have.”

He was silent. Had he changed? What did he look like now? Was he different? She felt an unexpected longing in her heart; it was as if she had never stopped loving him, as if he were always somewhere in her mind, and all the rest of it, everything else, was a form of emptiness you had to get through. This large waxed kitchen, her spotless life. She remembered how they had loved and she felt the sickness of a great loss.

“You shouldn't have called,” she was saying.

“I had to,” he said. “It's the last time.”

“I don't understand you,” she said. “What do you mean?” She was conscious of her own weird hysteria; of herself, seen as if from a height, a blob of a figure in a glossy, shining kitchen. She was herself a stain, something spilled and about to spread.

“I'm going away,” he said. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

“Where? Where are you going?”

“You'll hear about it, I guess.” He paused again. “I suppose the kids are in school?”

“Yes,” she said. “Ted, where are you going? You make this sound so …
final.
”

“That's the word,” he said. “Final would be a good word for it. I want you to tell the kids that I love them. I want them to try and understand.”

“Please,” she said. She was crying, despite herself she was crying, clutching the telephone as if afraid that it might, like some horrible kite, be tugged from her hand and blown with the wind. The cord was twisted around her wrist. She couldn't see, her eyesight was blurred.

“Please, Ted,” she said. “I don't understand you. Tell me what you mean. Tell me.”

But the line was dead and she was talking to nobody and it all might have been some dream, something that came in the depth of the night to touch her and make her wonder if, all those years before, she had made the mistake of her life.

Folly, Hollander thought. Sheer folly. But you don't take your leave without making a sound of some kind. He put the telephone down and stood with his face pressed against the glass inside the booth and felt the movement of a pain inside him. Then he recovered, the moment passed, he wasn't the father of three children again, he was Hollander about to defect. He could have called Davina. But they would have her telephone bugged by this time, expecting him to call her. He wasn't even sure of Mrs. Rowley Salladin's phone; a slight chance, maybe not much of one, not after all this time.

He went into the Pancake Palace.

Brinkerhoff was already at the table, picking gloomily at a blueberry waffle. Hollander sat down. He hoped they would understand, when it all came out he hoped they would not think too badly of him.

Brinkerhoff smiled. “I urged our undersecretary to use a telephone,” he said. “He isn't a telephone person, Hollander. He enjoys writing notes. It gives him time to wait for replies and think up countermoves.”

Hollander ordered coffee.

Brinkerhoff waited until the waitress had gone, then he said: “I hope you're ready for some protracted travel.”

“I'm ready,” Hollander said.

“We will drive early in the afternoon to an airfield near Damascus—”

“We?” Hollander asked.

“I would not let you travel alone, would I?” Brinkerhoff smiled; it was mirthless and yet Hollander saw, obliquely, some clumsy attempt at friendliness. Brinkerhoff trusted him, wanted to know him: he could see that now.

“Then what?” Hollander asked.

“Havana.”

Passports, visa, the necessary vouchers for foreign travel: Brinkerhoff appeared to have the means of transcending these nuisances.

“After Havana, Moscow,” Brinkerhoff said. “How do you feel now?”

“I'm ready,” Hollander said. A shadow crossed his mind, it floated through then was gone, a sense of doubt—could he step away from all this now? Could he stand back and free himself from the route he had chosen?
Did he want to?
He noticed Brinkerhoff's funereal hand pass across the cuff of his coat.

“I understand,” Brinkerhoff said. “I don't think I entirely understand you, Hollander. But to leave your own country … I understand that.”

“It's not just the leaving,” Hollander said, feeling a somewhat unexpected warmth toward the other man. Your only ally now, he thought. Your only comrade. “It's the knowledge you can never come back.”

Brinkerhoff stabbed his fork into the blueberry waffle, as though he were killing some domestic pest. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. There's that.”

“But I made the choice, didn't I?”

“You made the choice,” Brinkerhoff said. “Nobody made it for you.”

Hollander was silent now. The waitress approached their table, smiling, ready to please. He tried to remember what he had heard or read about service in Soviet restaurants. It was bad, nonexistent.

“Now,” Brinkerhoff said. “The remainder of your documents. Do you have those?”

Hollander finished his coffee. “I have to go to the bank before we do anything else,” he said.

Brinkerhoff looked at his watch. “We have plenty of time.”

Hollander ordered a second cup of coffee. He watched the waitress—Barbara Ann—cross to the coffeepot and pour. He looked up at the illuminated menus that hung on the walls. A world of waffles, pancakes, doughnuts, all lit in scrumptious color. Havana, he thought. Then Moscow.

“You're tense,” Brinkerhoff said. “Don't be.”

“I'm trying,” Hollander said. He shut his eyes.
When did you first feel you could save the world?
I don't know, Doc.
Have you always wanted to sacrifice yourself?
I don't know, Doc, I don't know.
You really think what you're doing will help sustain the balance of power?
I wish I could be sure, I wish I could be sure.
Hollander, I think you're a fool
.

He was aware of Brinkerhoff watching him.

He was trying to be sympathetic, understanding, he was stretching every fiber in a heart unaccustomed to feeling so that he might make Hollander be at ease.

“I'm fine,” Hollander said. “Don't worry about me.”

Sharpe took the call when it came: he had been lying on the office sofa, trying to catch up on his sleep, idly watching a game show on the color TV he had recently fetched from his apartment. It was called
Wheel of Fortune
. Contestants spun a wheel and got to buy prizes. Sometimes they went bankrupt.
I
'
ll have the his and her dressing gowns
, a woman was saying, a faceful of avarice.
I'll have the Gucci travel bag. I'll have the rest in a Tiffany gift certificate
. The wheel spun. The telephone rang. He was thinking, somewhat detachedly, of giving up the apartment and moving full time into the office. Think what you'd save. He reached for the receiver.

It was Richard F. Drucker. An old cold-warrior. He saw commies under the lids of saucepans and thought the long-dead senator from Wisconsin America's only modern saint. But Drucker was good with the electronic stuff; he had been born to eavesdrop.

“I've got something for you,” Drucker said.

Sharpe, watching the wheel of fortune spin, listened. When he got off the line, he called Dilbeck. From here on in it was a matter of speed.

In the public library Thorne opened the atlas at a table in the reference room. American states, American states. Arizona. He ran his finger down the list of cities and towns.

Eden
89

Ehrenburg
93

Elfrida
700

Elgin
247

El Mirage
3258

Eloy
5381

Escalante
72

Seventy-two, Thorne thought. It was your original one-horse settlement.

Escalante
72
C4

He checked C4 on the map.

Escalante lay somewhere between a place called Congress and a place called Dixon. He estimated it to be about a hundred and twenty miles northwest of Phoenix.

He closed the atlas.

He had been running all day, he had been scrambling like a thing caught in quicksand. Now he was tired and hollow. He massaged his eyelids, blinked, looked around the library. Empty tables, a middle-aged woman on a step-ladder, piling books on a high shelf, a clerk behind the desk stamping something on paper. There was a profound silence in here; you could not imagine noise, save for the whisper of turning pages. A fat guy was standing at the stacks of crime thrillers. To Thorne, he looked remotely familiar, a fact he dismissed from his mind.

Three, four days ago—it was like ancient history to him now. Three, four days ago, there had been a normality, a sense of things being in their right place. Not now. What could you say to describe the now: an awareness of flux? He thought of the midday flight for Paris. By now they would know he hadn't gone.
They
.

Things in the woodwork of Washington.

The termites that nibbled on the timbers of your life.

They.

Who were they?

More significantly, who were they
not?

He laid his hands on the cover of the atlas. The fat man by the crime stacks was leafing through a book. He wasn't reading; he had an abstracted, distant expression on his face.

The doughnut shop!

Unless he was badly mistaken, he had seen the same fat man inside the doughnut shop a while back. It would make sense. They would have somebody watching him.

Thorne closed his eyes and wondered:
Have I gone mad?

Is this lunacy? People following you, men drowning in swimming pools, wives afraid of their own kitchens, blank pages on a manuscript, a burglary, sudden unemployment. It had all the connected elements of a dream.

Somebody else's dream. Not his own.

He got up from the table and went outside. He crossed the parking lot and sat inside the VW, watching the library steps. The fat man came out a moment later, walked in a leisurely way down the steps, turned his head this way and that, looked at the VW, then lit a cigarette. It figured, Thorne thought. He wasn't very good at it. But maybe there were ramifications to that too, maybe he was supposed to know he was being followed because—because? Because of what? There might be more than one. There might be another he didn't know about. He was meant to notice the fat man, a kind of diversion that would keep him from spotting the other.

If there were an other.

Dear Christ, he thought.

They have me going in circles.

He started the engine of the VW. The man went to a pale-green Catalina. Yeah, Thorne thought: it was the same car that had picked him up just after dawn. The same damn car.

He drove out of the parking lot.

After a moment the Catalina followed.

He watched it in the mirror. It was as if the sight of it were the only tangible proof he had that he wasn't going completely out of his mind.

“It defeats me,” Dilbeck was saying. “It doesn't make any sense.”

“Why doesn't it make sense?” Sharpe said. “He called his former wife, sometimes a guy does that kind of thing—”

“It's ridiculous,” Dilbeck said. “Hollander knows the methodology, Sharpe. He knows the operation, the
modus operandi
. He knows we're looking for him. He must know we put the taps on all the numbers he's likely to call. He isn't a stupid man. Why call his wife?”

Sharpe was silent. He felt the sunlight beat down on his scalp, wished he had worn his hat. He watched Dilbeck look down in the direction of the trees; a slight breeze made the stalks shiver, the branches shift.

“Going away,” Dilbeck said.

“That's what he told her.”

“Going away,” Dilbeck said again. “He calls to say goodbye.”